Mr and Mrs Hammerhead
by lotuskasumi
Summary: From a Tumblr prompt: "Whouffaldi - "All you have to do is say, "yes"." Happy to play every game, yes, that hasn't changed at all, but there's a thrill in the fear, same as the way your heart drops as you fall. Will you be caught or will you crash? (Whouffle/Twelve x Clara)


"Am I home?" Clara asked, and then added in silence: All_ you have to do is say _yes_._Her eyes moved from the control console to his face and back again. _All you have to do is say _yes_, and I'll know where to take it from there._

"If you want to be." A quick smile, a breathless laugh, merging uncertainty, hope, and sadness in one simple look. It stirred her heart in a way she had long come to recognize and hide — but oh, how she hated that silly, stupid, precious ache. Now she'd have to bury it deeper, ignore it, shun it until the sensation knew better than to happen at all.

His reply wasn't the answer Clara had been looking for. It wasn't quite a yes, but it wasn't exactly displeasing to her, either. _If I want to be. _But she didn't know what she wanted, not now, not with him, not like this.

She'd much rather know what _he_ wanted, so she could take a stand from there.

"I'm sorry," Clara said, and watched as his face and smile and laughter fell like a stone.

—

They reconciled, impossibly so, and reunited briefly for a walk down the street to the nearest coffee shop, but as time caught up with Clara, so did her responsibilities. _Dad'll be worried out of his mind. _

She handed the Doctor what little cash she had and barked out her order, beating a hasty retreat to a noiseless corner of the shop. She checked the date on her phone and wondered how to explain her five day absence to her father. _Could be worse, _she reasoned, _could be five _months. _Or years._ _Laugh and try your best — he'll forgive you. He usually does._

Clara scrolled to the familiar number, held the phone to her ear, and prayed silently for no Lindas to appear.

Linda answered on the first ring. "So where have you been, then?"

That was almost as unbearable as what happened once the conversation was over — the Doctor was nowhere to be seen. And neither was her coffee.

—

Time passed, as time does, and although the very nature of a surprise is for a thing to happen when least expected, Clara certainly hadn't thought to expect _this_.

The Doctor was at Coal Hill, waiting for her — in a supply closet.

"Where the hell have you been?" Clara asked.

A pause. "You sent me for coffee." Simple, direct, and so sure — but the look on his face suggested otherwise. Just very slightly, but it was enough.

"Three weeks ago," she clarified, her tone clipped. "In Glasgow," she added, perhaps the most frustrating element of all.

"Three weeks — that's a long time," the Doctor said.

She hadn't expected that out of him but her temper and her pride, matters of great importance to her since it seemed not to register with him anymore, wouldn't let her focus on this surprising bit. "In _Glasgow_ — that's dead in a ditch."

"It's not my fault," he insisted. "I got distracted."

"By what?"

"You can always find something. Come on!"

Clara watched him turn and go, so certain that she'd follow. She didn't. She stood her ground, arms crossed, watching him take a few paces into the TARDIS and back again when he saw he was alone.

"Didn't you hear me?" he asked.

"I heard you just fine, Doctor."

"Then what's the matter?"

"Guessed that, have you?"

"I wasn't born yesterday."

"Technically you were born three weeks ago."

The Doctor took this in. "Everything's a nail with you now, isn't it, you…" he thought of the word, or perhaps a combination of them. She could see his mind reaching for it as he surveyed her with a glance that traveled from her waiting expression to the feet firmly planted on the ground. "… Little… Miss… Hammerhead," he finished, rather weakly.

Clara pointed at him. "Do _not_ compare me to carpentry tools." She paused. "Or… sharks, or any other nasty, bite-y creature. I have a perfectly good reason for being cross."

"Again?"

"Always," she insisted. "And it _takes _a hammerhead to _know _a hammerhead, by the way."

"What does that even — no, forget it," the Doctor began and stopped, not quite daring to laugh. "Look just — take the coffee, yeah? It'll get cold."

Refusing to ask _how _it couldn't be cold already — time machines crossing with the relative and utterly forgettable limitations of basic caffeinated physics — Clara glanced at the offered coffee and chose the cup marked _C. _It was warm in her hands, and she tapped her fingers against the side, enjoying the sound.

"Are you coming or not?" the Doctor asked. "We really ought to be going."

Clara liked the plural in the sentence, just as she liked his acknowledging that three weeks was indeed a long time to the one stuck on the slow path. But it paled in the light of her frustration, which was dimmed by the overwhelming shadow of her disappointment. He'd let her down again. He'd _left her_. _Again._ And she would harp on that for as long as it bothered her, the way she used to pick at scabs on her knees as a child, not out of a sense of brutality but an irrepressible eagerness to be healed and _done_ already.

"Where and why?" she asked.

On the threshold between what little room there was in the storage closet and the still impressive internal physics of the TARDIS, the Doctor positively huffed. "All you have to do is say _yes_, Clara," he said, frustrated as well, but with an air of absolute weariness. "Just a yes. One little yes. Go on. I'll even accept a foreign equivalent."

"I'll say yes only if you can do the same to my next question."

He tilted his head to the side. A sigh, a nod. "Go on, then," he said.

Clara searched his eyes, so pale and bright and like little shards of ice — but hadn't she heard _that _before, somewhere? _"There's a sliver of ice in his heart,_" Emma had said — and now the ice had grown up and out, lodging itself in his face full of lines and frowns… But she still remembered that smile when she asked if she was home. _"If you want to be." _So many ways to take that line, and she wondered which was the one he wanted her to pick. She still remembered the true and proper grief he'd shared over something so terrifyingly ferocious as a dinosaur let loose in London — _Victorian _London at that, imagine the scandal. There wasn't ice in his heart nor in his eyes — or, at least, it couldn't be anymore.

_It can't be ice_, she thought. _Not always._ Maybe mirrors, instead.

And in that moment of aching clarity, Clara saw her own fear reflected in the glass of his eyes. She saw the uncertainty, the vulnerability, like a person trying desperately to hide a wound that screams agape, eager for attention and terrified of the care. Look but don't look too close — see but don't see too much. Please.

There was only one thing to ask after a realization like that. "… Can I still count on you? Can you _prove _to me that I can still rely on you?"

"Yes," he said at once. There was no hesitation to the delivery, no thought given to the answer. Immediate, instinctual, and not because he wanted the conversation to be over and done with.

Clara took a sip of coffee. "One more question, then we're free to go."

"That's cheating," he protested, pointing at her. "You got the one question, just as you wanted. Play fair now, Clara."

"Consider this a sub-question, then. A minor follow-up." She smiled. "Do you plan to make a habit out of meeting me in closely confined areas?"

Her smile alarmed him as did the shift in tone, playful where she had once been somber. His answer came immediately, despite the confusion. "Yes?" he said, half asking and stating, wondering at the joke made partly at his expense. But then he caught the gleam in her eye and the smile she flashed him as she stepped onto the TARDIS. "Oh I don't like that look, no, I don't like it at all — take it off."

"Shut the door and I will." She set the coffee down and turned to him, smiling still.

It took him a moment, but the penny dropped in the end. "_Clara…_" he said, and there was a little sigh behind the name. But when he drew closer to her, his own coffee abandoned next to her cooling cup, there was no mistaking that smile.

* * *

**Notes**: I'd like to thank every kind word given in reviews and messages for all the Whouffaldi fic I've been sharing lately. ^^ I would have very little to do without your prompts, and very little motivation without your reviews and encouragement! Thank you all so much for reading~


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